Social Exchange, Accessibility, and Trust: Interpreters’ Perspectives of Inclusion in Chinese Welfare Factories (1950s–1990s)

This article examines the social inclusion process of early‐generation deaf workers in Chinese welfare factories (1950s–1990s) from the perspective of sign language interpreters. Drawing on oral history interviews with ten interpreters and social exchange theory, the analysis identifies three analytically distinct but sequential phases of social inclusion—initiating trust, reverse inclusion, and social inclusion—each centered on the interplay between accessibility and trust‐building and distinguished by patterns of hedonic value, activity, and referent. The initiating trust phase reveals how interpreters shifted from negative perceptions and inaction to positive engagement, fostering linguistic accessibility and affect‐based trust as they recognized deaf workers’ competence beyond linguistic barriers. Both reverse inclusion and social inclusion are marked by positive hedonic value and high activity, but differ in their primary referents, or agents of action. In reverse inclusion, deaf workers welcome interpreters into the community, deepening linguistic and cultural accessibility and fostering affect‐based trust that surpasses competence‐based trust. They further exercise their agency by petitioning factory leadership to appoint these trusted colleagues as official interpreters. In the social inclusion phase, interpreters use their agency to advance inclusion beyond the factory; the accumulated affect‐, commitment‐, and competence‐based trust from deaf workers empowers interpreters to bridge systemic inaccessibilities outside the factory. Our findings underscore accessibility as both the cornerstone and Achilles’ heel of social inclusion: It emerges as a product of social exchanges and as an enabler of trust at each phase, yet when welfare policies and institutions provide only physical, without linguistic and cultural, access, genuine social inclusion remains impossible.